Please advise me what to do in this situation. I had become a victim of a scam involving being sent money from compromised PayPal accounts. I had put up a post on a site targeted at Singaporeans, offering to help purchase and send anything they want from Japan. One day, someone in Vietnam contacted me, asking me to buy an iPhone 13 Pro that costed 142,480 yen from Rakuten Market, and forward it to him. I got him to pay me for the phone, plus the PayPal fees. He paid me from an account with a Japanese name. When the phone has arrived, I weighed it and told him it will cost 1400 yen to ship it to him, and he paid me a second time, from a different account with a Japanese name on it. I then shipped the phone to him. Later on the same day, he asked me to buy yet another iPhone 13 Pro from Rakuten Market that costed 158,500 yen. However, he claimed that he cannot pay more than 100,000 yen a day, and will thus pay me the rest the next day. He paid me 82,100 yen from yet another account with a Japanese name on it. Some hours later, he paid me 30,000 yen from yet another account with another Japanese name on it. However, less than 30 minutes later, I got an email saying that the account that paid me the 30,000 yen requested for a refund due to an ‘unauthorised transaction’. When I confronted the Vietnamese guy about it, he claimed that it’s not him, even though he clearly included a message in the 30,000 yen payment saying that it’s for the iPhone, and he even included his name on it. He kept trying to change the conversation and pretended not to know anything when I asked why all the accounts he paid me from had Japanese names on them, and who those people were. When I finally asked if he had been using others’ PayPal accounts to pay me without permission, he continued to deny it and play dumb till the very end. Later on, the account that he paid the 82,100 yen from also requested for a refund due to the ‘unauthorised transaction’. That confirmed my fears that the Vietnamese person had hacked into the accounts of those 4 people and have paid me with them. In the end, PayPal refunded both the 30,000 yen and the 82,100 yen to both accounts. I filed a police report with the Singapore Police Force, but there had been absolutely no response from them even though it’s been over a week, no matter how many times I emailed or called them. I then decided to file a police report with the Japanese police, but I was told there was nothing they could do because the Japanese police had no authority to go to Vietnam and arrest him, and it’s not that easy for them to just tell the Vietnamese Police to look for the guy, because it’s all dependent on the diplomatic relationships between Japan and Vietnam. They told me to contact PayPal about it and see what can be done. I had already posted out the first iPhone by the time I found out that he was a scammer, meaning that if the actual owners of the first 2 accounts he had misused notice the unauthorised transactions, they have the right to cancel them and ask PayPal for a refund. Thus, I would become the victim, having spent 143,880 yen on the phone and the shipping, and be left with nothing. I contacted a PayPal agent via the Message Centre, but he did not treat my situation seriously and told me to ‘ask the buyer to resend the money’ and told me to have a nice day. I told the agent to take the matter more seriously and that this was a criminal case. I have already exhausted every single avenue, since neither the police nor PayPal are able to do anything about this matter. I do not know what to do now. Would anyone advise me on what to do?
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